Most of my rapists are pretty confident that what occurred between us was consensual too. Just saying. This is not a situation where you get to grade your own paper. The best any truly decent man is that he hopes none of his partners regard their experience as a violation, however grey.

Now, I’ve never raped anyone

You’re ignoring the fact that there’s no conceivable way that a culture which has racism in its very bone marrow magically becomes instantly and completely colorblind after its taken over by conservative theocrats who are basically a nightmare version of our current far right wing. The showrunners are clearly…

the group Jness—a women’s empowerment arm of alleged sex cult NXIVM

The racism erasure was a cop out by showrunner too lazy or uncomfortable to properly tackle the issue. While Atwood’s approach was equally facile, there are myriad ways they might have highlight Gilead’s systemic racism without all-white casting. Women of color could have relegated to Marthas, for example, even the…

In my struggle to reconcile that subplot, I definitely considered that Mexico, due to environmental racism, would have been more greatly impacted by whichever pollutants precipitated the declining birthrate, and that Gilead’s leadership exploits that fact with their propagandist show of abundance (oranges! babies!)…

The renewable energy stuff threw me too. Like, this intensely theological regime is somehow also pro-science? How?

I can’t argue with you at all because I honestly considered this point as I was typing it. It’s similar to my gripe with casting (or in some cases scripting) choices for Count Paris most adaptations of Romeo & Juliet, including West Side Story and Shakespeare in Love. (Also Fiennes!) They always make him indisputably…

My entire point, before it derailed by argument I can’t believe had to go as far as it did, was that the series overemphasizes the infertility epidemic in a way that undercuts Atwood’s intent. The Mexican ambassador is not the only example of this, as you’ve illustrated.

Think what you want. But the very fact that they’re not at all interested in identifying potent men, that in fact they very word “impotent” is forbidden under their laws, should be all the confirmation needed to recognize that they are far less interested in making babies than they are in establishing cishet male…

I read the book way back in college, and it’s definitely easier to watch a screen adaptation when the book’s not so fresh in your mind. I remember having the same concerns about casting prior to watching it, but the effect isn’t as damaging to the story as you would imagine. Overall, the changes they make are a mixed…

She also made it clear that Gilead ultimately fails and falls, so your protests that their ineffective system would threaten their hold on power are more than moot. Nearly every feminist analysis of book acknowledges that the Handmaid system is a clear pretense for Gilead’s patriarchal dictatorship precisely because…

But to stay in power, they’ll actually need to address the problem they claimed to be solving by seizing power.

A lot of celebrity couples have shared that the extensive job-related travel requires them to be frequently apart, so that’s not odd at all.

Yes, but those two things are not mutually exclusive. It is possible for there to be both a sharply declining birthrate and a for that to be the pretense under which a dictatorship seizes power. Seizing and maintaining power is the only honest objective.

But the whole point is the declining birth rate was merely a pretense for establishing Gilead’s heteropatriarchal power structure. Anti-choice initiatives are rallying cry for right wing women, and thus are an ideal method for enlisting their complicity in the stripping of their own rights. The show undercuts that…

The show didn’t need a second season, so much as it just needed to make different choices in the first one.

Obviously no one other than doctors directly treating him are qualified to make a diagnosis. But based on my own experience and observations, depression or anxiety seems like an incomplete assessment because when Kanye is at his most Kanye, he appears to exhibit manic behavior as well. In order to for a manic episode…

Apparently, she got about $1M lump sum in the divorce plus another annual $100K alimony, but it still doesn’t account for that house. And I don’t even know how she justifies the need for it with three grown or nearly grown kids. Kenya, Cynthia, and Portia have discernible revenue streams and higher net worth than her,…

Sure, but don’t make it sound like Whedon was somehow amazingly prescient. That’s an exact description of Wonder Woman, as we known her for decades, and could’ve just as easily been drawn from observations of young Lynda Carter.